Revelation or Damnation? Depictions of Violence in Sarah Kane’s Theatre
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Summary
With her controversial stage art, the young playwright Sarah Kane broke new dramaturgic ground and made a lasting impression that changed British drama forever. Even though it is part of the canon covering post-war drama, Kane’s work has often met with misunderstanding and fierce criticism due to the uncountable representations of atrocities. How can we make sense of Kane’s seemingly crude and bleak theatre? Mainly concentrating on the play Cleansed, the author examines the nature of violence in Kane’s writing. What purpose does it serve? Is it simply employed for its shock value? Or is it rather used as a metaphor? Kane herself considered her third full-length play as a play about love. In suggesting a figurative reading of the late playwright’s texts, the author shows how Kane embraces violence as a metaphor of the various sufferings both love and life perpetrate upon the human being. Locked beneath the revolting cruelties, we can find a vivid theatricality, powerful images, and a unique rhythm and sound of language.
Excerpt
Table Of Contents
8
study since there are interesting parallels between their work and the one of Sarah Kane,
which they both influenced.
Kane's plays emerged in a short span of time between 1993 and 1999. In addition to
Blasted, they include Phaedra's Love (1996),
8
Cleansed (1998), Crave (1998) and 4.48
Psychosis, which was written in 1998/99 and first published and produced posthumously in
2000. She also wrote the script for a short film for television, entitled Skin, which was written
in 1995 and produced by British Screen/Channel 4 in 1997. Her work was immediately
translated into the most important international languages. She undoubtedly made a strong
impact on contemporary British theatre and influenced the writing of many authors, but her
unique plays are pieces of art which stand on their own.
I have already mentioned the critical and public uproar that greeted Kane's work
throughout the years due to its disturbingly explicit violence and scenes which, through their
intensity, stamp themselves upon our minds. Violence in drama is an interesting yet complex
concept, the various forms and functions of which have been widely discussed for as long as
it has appeared. It can be found in both Ancient and Renaissance theatre as well as in modern,
post-modern and contemporary drama. Although it was used as a device in the theatre of each
epoch, it is striking that violence features largely in contemporary drama, and especially in the
work of young playwrights who started emerging at the end of the twentieth century.
Being interested in and fascinated by the writing of Sarah Kane and having seen all of
her dramatic pieces performed on stage, I ask the question that presses itself upon most
readers or spectators of her plays: what purpose does the excessive use of violence serve? Is it
employed for its shock value, or is it integral to the plot such as setting or imagery? In order
to make sense of her otherwise crude and bleak plays, I thought about interpreting certain acts
in a figurative sense. This assumption is supported by Kane herself, who, on several occa-
sions, intimated using violence as a metaphor, thus suggesting the possibility of finding the
meaning of extremely intense and cruel scenes behind the act, not within it. Bearing this idea
in mind, I will examine the nature of violence in her writing, its manifold forms and the
different levels on which it operates. By analysing significant passages of her drama which
are relevant to the subject, it will be the task of this study to get to the bottom of Kane's use of
violence and to investigate if and to what extent the various illustrations of brutality can be
interpreted as metaphoric. Despite the fact that each of Kane's five plays abounds in violent
Letters 1, p. 139. After the young playwright's death Bond wrote a passionate appreciation of Kane in which he
compares her to those dramatists whose work "changes the human reality." Edward Bond, "Sarah Kane and
theatre," in Saunders, "Love me or kill me," pp. 189-91.
8
The years given behind all plays mentioned in this study refer to the first publication, not the first production of
the work.
9
scenes of different sorts, I shall mainly concentrate on Cleansed, her third full-length play to
be staged, which I consider the nucleus of her writing, from both a stylistic and a thematic
point of view. However, I will show parallels and point out elements of recurrence in all of
her work.
In the following chapter I will shortly point out the theatrical background in which
Kane's drama emerged. A brief outline of the theatre in the 1990s will be given, also consid-
ering the so-called "in-yer-face" theatre to which the decade gave rise and whose most
noticeable feature is the explicit representation of violence and sex. Chapter Three surveys
typical characteristics of Sarah Kane's dramatic art. Central to this investigation of her styles
and features will be the subtle interplay of realism and surrealism in her work, as well as the
author's increasing abandonment of formal considerations and her Beckettian reduction from
physicalisation to text. Chapter Four offers a critical analysis of Cleansed and will, after a
more general overview concerning its formal and thematic nature, profoundly investigate the
play's themes, imagery and symbolism, which are the major devices by which the play is
realised and its message conveyed. The main themes in the play are love, identity and
language, while its symbolism is predominantly characterised by the appearance of the
flowers and the use of light. In this chapter I will also consider the problems which perform-
ing the play poses and which generally arise when producing a Kane play. Chapter Five is
dedicated to Kane's fascination with violence. Analysing its use and function, I will concen-
trate on physical violence and violence that is motivated by language. Chapter Six will look at
the function of the spectator who is assigned a variety of roles in Kane's work: not only is he
or she the one who makes the play work by translating into reality what is happening on stage,
but the audience also has to live through the same experiences as the characters. They are both
victims and accomplices. In Chapter Seven I will give a brief summary of the main points of
my study and, in the hope of having found an answer to the questions I have posed, draw a
final conclusion.
Instead of drawing on any scholarly apparatus or discussing Sarah Kane's work in
terms of one of the various theoretical (dramatic) frameworks, I will rather try not to push her
writing in a certain direction nor reduce it by assigning it to a certain movement. By means of
a close and accurate reading of her texts, my study attempts to approach the work of the late,
young writer which, until today, has remained little- or even misunderstood.
11
2 The
theatrical
background
Kane's Blasted, called "a landmark in theatre history"
9
by Graham Saunders, exerted a major
impact on contemporary British drama in the nineties. Casting a retrospective glance at
British theatre of the time, one can say that Kane's debut play was a dramatic milestone that
heralded a new era in contemporary playwriting. It ushered in a new generation. Towards the
end of the millennium there was the gradual emergence of different voices and around the
mid-nineties British theatre experienced an explosion in creativity and new writing.
10
There
was a polyphony of (dramatic) voices of new and young talents experimenting with new
techniques. These experiments resulted in a drama which is less accomodating and which
resists being pigeonholed. It is a combination of several different dramatic patterns. However,
even if these young playwrights cannot be classified as a homogeneous group since their
writing is too diverse in terms of style and technique, there are some common characteristics
among them. One trademark of the theatre of the nineties, which features in many of the plays
that were written and produced at that time, is the tackling of a peculiar combination of
political and social issues with surreal and dreamlike settings and images. Despite being a
reflection of the political atmosphere at the time, many of these plays tried to avoid explicit
references to politics and society a phenomenon which also applies to women's theatre. The
growing importance of woman playwrights was one of the distinctive characteristics of the
nineties, though, generally speaking, they are still underrepresented today.
11
While the first
two waves of feminist playwriting in the seventies and eighties, associated with the names
Caryl Churchill, Pam Gems and Timberlake Wertenbaker, showed an intense political and
social observation, feminist playwrights in the nineties were still interested in politics and in
women's issues, but they tried to combine their message with more abstract and universal
images. Another characteristic, which distinguished many of the new playwrights, was their
candid way of tackling topics such as sex and violence. The presentation of bodily functions
and explicit sex scenes on stage, among them homosexual sex and anal rape, typifies the
theatre of the nineties. Although the use of such violent and explicit acts may have been used
more persistently in the nineties, their onstage performance was by no means a novelty. Only
9
Saunders, "Love me or kill me," p. 117; several other authors use the phrase; see, for example, Rebellato,
"Sarah Kane: an Appreciation," p. 280.
10
See Sierz, "Beyond Timidity?," p. 55.
11
See Mary Luckhurst, "An Embarrassment of Riches. Women Dramatists in 1990s Britain," in Bernhard Reitz
and Mark Berninger (eds.), British Drama of the 1990s (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter, 2002), p. 75;
see also Elaine Aston and Janelle Reinelt, "A century in view: from suffrage to the 1990s," in Elaine Aston and
Janelle Reinelt (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Modern British Women Playwrights (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 1; see also Edgar, State of Play, p. 8 and Michael Raab, Erfahrungs-
räume: Das englische Drama der neunziger Jahre (Trier: WVT Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 1999), p. 18.
12
a decade before, in 1980, the première of Howard Brenton's The Romans in Britain had
caused a furore among theatre-goers which was similar to the one Edward Bond had caused
fifteen years before with his play Saved in 1965. Brenton's depiction of the Romans' brutal
conquest of Britain (a reflection of the English invasion of Ireland) included a scene in which
a Celt is raped by a Roman soldier. While at the time the illustration of anal sex or, in its
worst form, male rape on stage was unusual or at least a sight that spectators were not used to,
it was to become a frequently used image in the theatre of the nineties where the transfor-
mation of activity into passivity was used to symbolise man's loss of virility, hinting at a
crisis of male identity and masculinity.
12
Young dramatists such as Sarah Kane, in whose
plays Blasted and Cleansed we find instances of male rape as well, Mark Ravenhill, Anthony
Neilson and Martin Crimp, to name a few, were soon dubbed "New British Nihilists" or
"New Brutalists" by the press due to their disillusioned and bleak approach to reality and their
gloomy life philosophy, which they express in their confrontational plays.
13
Terms like these,
which were consistently fixed to the new playwrights and their work, are what theatre critic
Aleks Sierz would rather have substituted with the term "in-yer-face" since, contrary to the
other coinages, it does not stress the novelty of this phenomenon by merely describing what
this kind of theatre does, but also by pointing out how it achieves this.
14
In many respects, Sarah Kane can be considered a child of her time whose writing re-
flects the zeitgeist by which she was coined. Being many-sided, her theatre is a typical
product of that era and can be linked to various currents in literary history. While Sierz clearly
puts Kane in line with her fellow writers, assigning her debut play Blasted a central position
in the "movement,"
15
Saunders stresses the difference between her theatre and "the largely
12
See Sierz, "Beyond Timidity?," p. 57; see also Aleks Sierz, "In-Yer-Face Theatre. Mark Ravenhill and 1990s
Drama," in Reitz and Berninger, British Drama of the 1990s, p. 114.
13
See Ken Urban, "An Ethics of Catastrophe: The Theatre of Sarah Kane," PAJ: A Journal of Performance and
Art, 69 (2001), p. 37. These terms and, above all, the addition "new" are not quite correct and somewhat
misleading; the movement should be regarded as a second wave of "new brutalism." Aston points out that the
expression was already used during the 1980s where it referred to feminist plays such as the pieces of the
teenage dramatist Andrea Dunbar, which showed the brutality and oppression of working class life especially
women had to suffer; see Elaine Aston, An introduction to feminism and theatre (London and New York:
Routledge, 1995), p. 77.
14
See Sierz, "In-Yer-Face Theatre. Mark Ravenhill and 1990s Drama," p. 109.
15
See Sierz, In-Yer-Face Theatre, pp. xii, 234; see also Raimund Borgmeier, "`Let's make it really, really rude':
The British Confrontational Theatre of the 1990s," in Christiane Schlote and Peter Zenzinger (eds.), New
Beginnings in Twentieth-Century Theatre and Drama Essays in Honour of Armin Geraths (Trier: WVT
Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2003), pp. 81, 84. Although I use the word "movement" here, it is important to
mention that Sierz himself does not consider "in-yer-face" theatre as such and instead uses the terms "new
sensibility" and "aesthetic style;" see Sierz, "In-Yer-Face Theatre. Mark Ravenhill and 1990s Drama," p. 114;
see also Aleks Sierz, "Cool Britannia? `In-Yer-Face' Writing in the British Theatre Today," New Theatre
Quarterly, 56 (1998), p. 333, where he adds the expression "temporary phenomenon."
13
socio-realist concerns of her contemporaries,"
16
bearing in mind her use of a poetic imagery,
her surrealism and her retreat from naturalism and their place in the political drama of the
nineties.
Being one of a small number of women playwrights and showing a certain concern for
women's and gender issues, Kane has also been discussed in terms of feminism. However, it
turned out that Kane does not fit easily into the feminist framework. Playwright Rebecca
Prichard recognises Kane's strong point in her avoidance of an exclusive concentration
invested upon issues that are pertinent to women for the benefit of a more general, open-
minded writing "about the world."
17
Elaine Aston and Janelle Reinelt, on the other hand,
show the points of difference between Kane's theatre and the one of truly feminist play-
wrights, drawing attention to the difficulty of linking Kane to the feminist tradition of
playwrights such as Churchill and Wertenbaker. According to them, Kane's drama, marked
by the persistent use of violence, constitutes an anomaly and rather puts her alongside such
playwrights as Edward Bond.
18
Kane herself was wary of terms such as "woman writer." As
most writers, she did not want to be classified and resisted the notion of being part of a
movement:
My only responsibility as a writer is to the truth, however unpleasant that truth may be. I have no
responsibility as a woman writer because I don't believe there's such a thing. When people talk
about me as a writer, that's what I am, and that's how I want my work to be judged on its quali-
ty, not on the basis of my age, gender, class, sexuality or race. I don't want to be a representative
of any biological or social group of which I happen to be a member.
19
In this passage Kane expresses a wish every artist will share with her beyond all doubt: to be
recognised as an individual with her own qualities and a unique voice among all writers of her
time. Kane wanted to be treated in the same way as she treated her characters: respectful,
unprejudiced and without any attempt to be categorised.
16
Graham Saunders, "The Apocalyptic Theatre of Sarah Kane," in Reitz and Berninger, British Drama of the
1990s, p. 130.
17
Rebecca Prichard, "Plays by Women: Clare McIntyre, Winsome Pinnock, Rebecca Prichard," in Edgar, State
of Play, p. 60.
18
See Elaine Aston and Janelle Reinelt, "Editors' note" to "Part 4: The Subject of Identity," in Aston and
Reinelt, The Cambridge Companion to Modern British Women Playwrights, pp. 214-5.
19
Kane, quoted in Stephenson and Langridge, Rage and Reason, pp. 134-5.
15
3
Sarah Kane's dramatic art
3.1
Kane's writing: similarities and points of difference in her plays
In the short period between 1993 and 1999 Sarah Kane wrote five plays which constitute her
lifework. Each of them is marked by "the explosive theatricality, the lyricism, the emotional
power, and the bleak humour"
20
that are hallmarks of Kane's writing. Just as her models
Bertolt Brecht, Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter, Kane departed from the path of (British)
naturalism.
21
Kane was a constant experimenter. Each of her plays has its own quality and
develops an independent style of its own. Even though there is an evident development in her
work, a red thread which (thematically) links all of her plays, different styles crystallised in
the process of her writing, which allow the subdivision of Kane's theatre. The critic Ruby
Cohn makes out "two radically different theatre styles"
22
in Kane's work, the result of which
are three violent and two linguistic plays. While Kane's first three plays, Blasted, Phaedra's
Love, and Cleansed, are characterised by their excessive violence, her last two plays, Crave
and 4.48 Psychosis, show a language oriented dramaturgy and put emphasis on a poetically
dense language. The atrocities of her first three plays are substituted in her last two works by
verbal devices.
23
The imagery thus moved from a mainly physical to a textual realisation and
in her last two plays it is words, rather than action, that build the play. However, Kane's
linguistic plays do not entirely renounce the poetic imagery which dominates her first three
plays. In Crave and 4.48 Psychosis, language does not substitute the visual images, it rather
comprises them.
24
In each of her plays Kane employed different stylistic and linguistic
techniques. Hence, "enfold[ing] a different architecture,"
25
every single play is special and
stands on its own as a piece of art. However, as pointed out above, there are also parallels and
similarities such as a common thematic core which unites the five plays: they all deal with
extreme emotional forces and mental states. Kane's characters are torn between feelings
ranging from love to hatred. They move between the extreme ends of pleasure and pain. The
depiction of these concrete psychic, mental and emotional extremes finds its counterpart in a
stage scenery, setting and time which are more abstract, often dreamlike and unreal. Except
20
Greig, Complete Plays, p. ix.
21
See Greig, Complete Plays, p. ix. An additional comment is necessary. Despite the fact that throughout my
study I stress Kane's retreat from naturalism it must be mentioned that her first three plays also bear typically
naturalistic characteristics which becomes obvious, for example, in the abundant stage directions, the milieu of
the characters and their way of speaking which includes instances of stuttering.
22
Ruby Cohn, "Sarah Kane, an Architect of Drama," Cycnos, 18:1 (2001), p. 39.
23
See Cohn, "Sarah Kane, an Architect of Drama," p. 46.
24
See Urban, "An Ethics of Catastrophe," p. 43.
25
Cohn, "Sarah Kane, an Architect of Drama," p. 39.
16
for Blasted, in which the text indicates that the action takes place in Leeds, Kane's plays are
all very imprecise and general in terms of their setting. And even in the case of Kane's first
play the opening stage direction alludes to the universality of the place: "A very expensive
hotel room in Leeds the kind that is so expensive it could be anywhere in the world" (1:3).
26
Phaedra's Love, a retitled free adaptation of Seneca's Phaedra, as well as Cleansed, take
place in an unnamed country. Both plays lack identifiable locations. There is also a timeless
feeling about Kane's writing. Cleansed and Blasted are the only plays in which the sense and
the passing of time are indicated by means of the changing weather and different seasons.
Kane's last two plays, Crave and 4.48 Psychosis, lack scenic indications to setting, time and
place altogether. In never precisely specifying time and location by never explicitly stating
when and where a specific action happens, the plays achieve a certain universality.
Uncertainty is one of the typical traits of Kane's theatre. There is mystery in every-
thing. There is always a certain degree of ambivalence. Her characters, too, are incomprehen-
sible to us. We cannot understand them. They are obscure to each other and to the audience.
Kane indulged in these ambiguous characters who resist being pigeonholed. However, in spite
of their being capable of the most horrible actions towards each other, it would be wrong to
over-generalise and label them "evil." In a Kane play designations such as good and evil,
victim and perpetrator no longer hold. There are no good or bad characters. Her characters
resist simplification. Rejecting such dichotomies, Kane showed herself wary of thinking in
such categories and of applying them to her characters:
I write about human beings, and since I am one, the ways in which all human beings operate is
feasibly within my understanding. I don't think of the world as being divided up into men and
women, victims and perpetrators. I don't think those are constructive divisions to make, and they
make for very poor writing.
27
What Kane describes here, namely the avoidance of easy definition and the reluctance of
attempting to classify human beings in a man-woman, victim-perpetrator or also guilty-
innocent scheme is, according to Sierz, characteristic of nineties drama.
28
In Kane's work the
border between binary oppositions dissolves. Instead of putting them side by side, in her
plays, she rather challenges dichotomies. Characters are both good and evil. They are both
victim and perpetrator, an aspect to which I shall return below. We look in vain for any kind
26
Unless stated otherwise, all quotations from Sarah Kane's work come from Complete Plays (2001). All
subsequent references to Kane's plays will use this source and will be given in the body of the text. A reference
such as (1:3) refers to the scene followed by the page number.
27
Kane, quoted in Stephenson and Langridge, Rage and Reason, p. 133.
28
See Sierz, In-Yer-Face Theatre, p. 244.
17
of moral guidance provided by the author. There is no redeeming humanism in Kane. She
never says that the good side in her characters will finally win. There is just total and utter
brutality presented in a very cold, routine-like way. With their bleak and depressing atmos-
phere, her plays are very hard to digest. Kane's drama is very dark and very pessimistic. Kane
saw things in a very negative way. Her disillusioned approach to life and to reality is reflected
in her work which, owing to characters who often deny and negate, contains a destructive hue.
Kane's theatre is remarkable and outstanding in that it brings together elements of the
present and the past. While on the one hand her drama is a product of her time, on the other
hand she borrows from the past. In her plays we find both a more film-like version of drama
with short and quick speeches and faster dialogues, typical of the nineties, and apparent in
Blasted and Phaedra's Love, and a literary, more refined language which characterised theatre
in the seventies and eighties, as in her play Cleansed.
29
Another characteristic of the theatre of
the nineties that features in Kane's plays is the avoidance of explicitly political themes and of
realism for the benefit of a more surrealistic, dreamlike kind of drama. This will be the topic
of the next chapter.
3.2
The interaction between realism and surrealism
The abandonment of realism and of explicitly political and social concerns, which I have just
mentioned as a feature of nineties drama, can also be found in Kane's work. In her plays she
tries to combine a socio-political message with surrealism. In spite of her plays not being
overtly political, we find a lot of denunciation in them: "[A]lthough her work is not explicitly
political (...) it does implicitly criticize a society built on violence and denial."
30
Kane
comments indirectly on the social situation and her drama can be considered as an examina-
tion and description of contemporary British society. She constructs her drama as a world set
in contrast to the real one, representing a commentary on the present.
31
Her perception and
reflection of the world is often conveyed by non-realistic means. What she wants to express
via theatre is mostly realised by indirection and metaphor, by a poetic lyricism and an
unparalleled use of imagery and symbolism to which I will return later. With her first per-
29
See Sierz, "In-Yer-Face Theatre. Mark Ravenhill and 1990s Drama," p. 115; see also Sierz, In-Yer-Face
Theatre, p. 244.
30
Sierz, In-Yer-Face Theatre, p. 120; see also Sierz, "Cool Britannia?," p. 332, Bernhard Reitz, "Fringe
Prophecies and Subsidized Warnings: Political Theatre in the Thatcher Era," in Bernhard Reitz and Heiko Stahl
(eds.), What Revels are in Hand? Assessments of Contemporary Drama in English in Honour of Wolfgang
Lippke (Trier: WVT Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2001), pp. 118-9 and Dan Rebellato, "Sarah Kane," in
Colin Chambers (ed.), The Continuum Companion to Twentieth Century Theatre (London and New York:
Continuum, 2002), p. 413.
31
See Anna Opel, Sprachkörper: Zur Relation von Sprache und Körper in der zeitgenössischen Dramatik
Werner Fritsch, Rainald Goetz, Sarah Kane (Bielefeld: Aisthesis Verlag, 2002), p. 185.
18
formed work Kane started what was to become one of the main characteristics of her writing:
the interplay of realism and surrealism. Blasted unites naturalistic and symbolic images. By
suddenly turning into an accumulation of surreal scenes, the socio-realistic reflection of
today's Britain, which is the play's point of departure, is substituted by a hypothetical
representation of a Britain torn by civil war in the second part of the play. While Kane
juxtaposes these two concepts in her first two plays, Cleansed is more daring in that within it
the playwright interweaves the threads of realism and surrealism. She deliberately blurs the
distinction between reality and illusion which becomes evident in the utterances, acts and
even uncertain materiality of some characters. The retreat from realism and the formal
deviations from naturalism also manifest themselves in the omnipresent mystery and opaque-
ness of the setting, time and characters. As pointed out previously, in Kane's drama there are
hardly ever any references to where and when the action takes place, and the identity of the
characters is often veiled and mystified. Kane's plays are thus endowed with a hypothetical
tinge. They are oneiric and dreamlike, but in a very bleak and depressing way. Even though in
Kane much of the violence and the terrifying atmosphere is hinted at rather than fully re-
vealed,
32
it goes without saying that suggestion can be even more distressing than concrete
representations and pictures.
33
Since implication, what cannot be seen and experienced, can be
far worse and difficult to bear than the definable and known, Kane's drama is all the more
effective. Kane herself pointed out that images can be more disturbing than a real representa-
tion. This is exactly what she admired in Georg Büchner, whose masterpiece Woyzeck (first
published in 1878) she directed in 1997: "What's so extraordinary about it is that he isolates
moments of real extremity one after the other in such a way that you are aware that you are
never looking at the real thing. What you get thrown back on is the idea, which is always
more disturbing."
34
According to Kane, Woyzeck was also one of the texts which inspired the
writing of her third full-length play Cleansed, together with George Orwell's Nineteen
Eighty-Four (1949), August Strindberg's The Ghost Sonata (1907) and Shakespeare's Twelfth
Night (earliest preserved text from 1623).
35
Another influence on Cleansed was Franz Kafka's
The Trial (first edition 1925), a novel which, according to Kane, never explicitly states
anything but which all the same sends its message very clearly in every moment of the
32
See Sierz, In-Yer-Face Theatre, p. 117.
33
See David Benedict, "Real live horror show," The Independent, 9 May 1998, p. 18.
34
Kane, quoted in Dominic Cavendish, "Kane and Able. Sarah Kane's notoriety over Blasted eclipsed her talent
as a playwright. Dominic Cavendish meets the woman behind the infamy," The Big Issue, 3 November 1997.
35
See Nils Tabert, "Gespräch mit Sarah Kane," in Nils Tabert (ed.), Playspotting: Die Londoner Theaterszene
der 90er (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, 2001), pp. 18-9.
19
novel.
36
At first glance, Kane's plays seem to be very distant from us and from our reality.
They look like something completely alien to us. However, they elicit a very direct reaction
from the viewer. This seemingly contradictory reaction is, at least partially, caused by the
excessive use of violence which creates two different effects. While on the one hand the plays
attract us by eliciting a gut reaction from us, on the other hand they also create distance. They
are very concrete and very abstract at the same time and thus give us the impression of being
both close and distant from us. There is a kind of oxymoronic link of rejection and attraction,
of distance and proximity that we experience during the performance of a Kane play. We are
repelled and fascinated at the same time. By being unclear and cryptic, many things elude our
comprehension. We neither understand the characters nor their cruel deeds towards each
other. But at the same time, fluctuating between repulsion and fascination, we are hypnotised
by the plays. The (profound) emotions which the drama of Sarah Kane arouses in an audience
and the reactions and role of the spectator will be discussed in more detail at a later stage of
this study.
After having shown how Kane melts elements of realism and surrealism with one an-
other, I will now continue with the characteristics of her dramatic art. The issue of her
concentration on the essential and her increasing reduction of the classic dramatic categories
such as setting, dialogue and characterisation, is pursued in the following chapter.
3.3
The art of reduction
Analysing Kane's body of work, it immediately strikes one that she formally reduced her
drama with every new play. The formal categories of drama such as plot, setting and charac-
ter, give noticeably way to a focus on language. The transition from plays that are full of
action to a kind of drama which only consists of words, is a process which manifested itself
little by little, from one play to the next. The habit of continually reducing the formal consid-
erations in favour of an exclusive preoccupation with language is reminiscent of Beckett who,
together with Büchner, Bond and Howard Barker, was one of the major influences on Kane
and her work.
37
As pointed out earlier, there is a formal distinction between Kane's first three
and her last two plays. In Blasted, Phaedra's Love and Cleansed the distinction between main
text and scenic direction creates characters and situations and marks the stage as the space and
world which is inhabited by the characters.
38
In Crave and 4.48 Psychosis, however, the stage
is no longer the characters' habitat and, in contrast to the other three plays, it is no longer the
36
See Tabert, "Gespräch mit Sarah Kane," p. 8.
37
See Greig, Complete Plays, p. xv.
38
See Opel, Sprachkörper, pp. 132-3.
20
frame of reference to which their utterances refer.
39
In Kane's later writing the characters
disappear as visual categories on stage and instead dissolve into the text. They are reduced to
the sound of voices and to the music and rhythm of language. In Kane's last two plays action
is substituted by the inner worlds of the characters, by what they think, feel and experience
and by what they express in words. Cleansed is the decisive turning-point between Kane's
different theatre styles. In her first two plays, Blasted and Phaedra's Love, the formal dra-
matic categories are still ensured. Both plays are divided into scenes, have a recognisable plot,
an action indicated by abundant stage directions, and distinguishable characters whose names
and gender are clearly stated. With Cleansed Kane took the first step in the direction of
dissolving boundaries. Characters change their identities by adopting each others' names, by
exchanging clothes and even bodies so that the distinctions between the individuals slowly
evaporate. The blur between self and other, that is the loss of identity, which is caused by the
effacing of boundaries, will be discussed at another stage of the paper. Apart from characters
which are no longer distinguishable from one another, in her third play Kane also introduced
figures who can only be heard but who never actually appear on stage.
40
These "personless"
characters, named the Voices, are reduced to speech and to action and to the effect they have
on the other characters of the play. We hear what they say and see the results of their brutal
deeds to which the other characters' bodies react. While Kane's first two plays were charac-
terised by an abundance of dialogue, in Cleansed, the vivid intercommunication of the
characters seems to erode. Characters do not exhaust the possibilities of language as a means
of communication. They are taciturn. However, thanks to a very pictorial and often highly
poetic language, much more is conveyed with the characters' few words than might appear at
first sight: "[Kane] uses the smallest amount of words possible to achieve coherence and
completeness."
41
Apart from the figurative language, which all of Kane's five plays share,
they are distinguished by a symbolic and sometimes surreal stage imagery. However, there
are essential differences. While in her first three texts numerous scenic indications ask for a
physical realisation of these images (whether they can actually be seen on stage depends, of
course, on the respective performance), they are transported in her last two plays via lan-
guage. This is why language is so significant in Kane's later work: it does not only show the
author's concentration on text but it is also the only means of conveying (the characters'
inner) images. It is words that conjure up these visions. Being acoustic rather than visual
39
See Opel, Sprachkörper, pp. 133, 173.
40
Interestingly, the use of disembodied voices features also in the later plays of Beckett; see Andrew Kennedy,
Six dramatists in search of a language (London: Cambridge University Press, 1975), pp. 139, 152, 157, 163-4.
41
Urban, "An Ethics of Catastrophe," p. 42.
21
plays, Crave and 4.48 Psychosis are dominated by imagination.
42
Since there is no action, the
reader or spectator has to imagine what is transmitted, expressed or only hinted at by language
while in the other plays the images are mostly enacted on stage. With regard to the distinction
between realisation and imagination, Cleansed can be said to occupy an intermediate position
in the sense that no final decision has been taken in favour of either of the two. The play
stands out for both its "real" images and for those which are only imagined. Images are
transported both visually and verbally. In Cleansed, the visual and the verbal belong together.
They are inseparable. The "presence" of the disembodied Voices, which are not represented
through physical figures, anticipates Kane's renunciation of physicalisation for the benefit of
an exclusive focus on language in her later work. With Crave Kane continued on her path of
reduction. Turning away from the performance of extreme images of sex, violence and
mutilation of her first three plays, she substituted physicalisation with language. Crave offers
no recognisable plot to speak of. No action can be seen on stage. Leaving the trail of natural-
istic theatre and its formal considerations, the playwright renounced plot and characters and
concentrated on language and the power of words, which are delivered in pieces of dialogue
and in soliloquies. While in Cleansed language still has the function of an interpersonal
means of communication, in Crave language is no medium of communication; it is rather a
means to convey thoughts and feelings, to get rid of all the burdens which weigh on the
characters' minds. Crave is conceived as a confused din of voices. The characters speak in
chorus, their utterances referring to one another rather coincidentally. Reduction also mani-
fests itself as far as the characters are concerned. They are designated by mere letters and not
further characterised. Reduced to letters, the four depersonalised characters are simply called
A, B, C, and M. These designations neither provide the characters with names nor with
gender and therefore do not endow them with identity. Since there are no textual indications
regarding place, time or the action of the characters, all they think, feel and worry about is
conveyed by what they say. All the characters do is speak. All the audience can do is listen.
With its abundant dialogue Crave is a reduction to the text. The viewers or listeners, one
should say, are not diverted by a stage scenery or by the characters' actions. All they can do is
hear the four characters' voices come, go, disappear and overlap. A, B, C, and M direct their
sentences to an unknown addressee, and they refer to one another only seldom. Despite the
fact that the characters exclusively speak, they are not verbose. As in Kane's previous work
and in her last play, words are carefully chosen. Crave cannot be limited to a mere departure
from Kane's earlier work because there are also continuities. Although marking a change of
42
See Opel, Sprachkörper, p. 173.
22
style, formally and thematically, Kane's fourth play stands in line with her previous writing.
43
In her last play, 4.48 Psychosis, Kane continued with her reduction of the text and with the
evaporation of boundaries. As in Crave, the play is virtually actionless. Neither place nor time
are indicated. But this time it even remains unclear for how many actors the play was written.
While in Crave the voices of the four initialled characters can be distinguished from one
another, in 4.48 Psychosis the boundaries between the single individuals dissolve completely.
There are only voices. The writing consists of monologues and fragments of dialogues. Being
a text without characters, Kane's last play has also been called "a dramatic poem (...), rather
than a play."
44
4.48 Psychosis does not only represent the final piece of Kane's body of work,
but also the peak of her way of continually reducing the external nature of her theatre, such as
setting and the characters' actions, and of increasingly focusing on the text itself. With its
ultimate reduction to language and with its extinction of the categories of character, place and
time, the play seems to be the embodiment of dissolution and lays bare "the ultimate narrow-
ing of Kane's focus in her work."
45
Connected with Kane's habit of concentrating on the
essentials is the fact that she herself, in her position as author, always kept in the background.
She believed that there was no need for a play of quality to be explained and amended by any
explanations.
46
Kane avoids rendering readers and spectators assistance: "If a play is good, it
breathes its own air and has a life and voice of its own. What you take that voice to be saying
is no concern of mine. It is what it is. Take it or leave it."
47
Since she renounced providing
explanations, we have to cope with what we see and hear by ourselves.
After having pointed out general features of Sarah Kane's theatre, namely the inter-
weaving of realistic and surrealistic elements and the abandonment of formal considerations
which results in a shift from physicalisation to text characteristics which apply to Kane's
complete work, I shall now concentrate on Cleansed and investigate its dramatic, thematic
and linguistic nature.
43
See Greig, Complete Plays, p. xv.
44
Cohn, "Sarah Kane, an Architect of Drama," p. 47; see also Michael Billington who, in his review of 4.48
Psychosis, uses the terms "dramatised poem" and "ruthlessly self-analytical theatrical poem." Michael Billing-
ton, "How do you judge a 75-minute suicide note?" The Guardian, 30 June 2000, p. 5.
45
Greig, Complete Plays, p. xvi.
46
See Greig, Complete Plays, p. xviii; see also Saunders, "Love me or kill me," p. 27.
47
Kane, "Afterword to Blasted," in Frontline Intelligence 2: New Plays for the Nineties, selected and introduced
by Pamela Edwardes (London: Methuen, 1994), p. 51.
23
4 A
critical
analysis
of
Cleansed
4.1
Form and content of the play
Kane's third play, Cleansed, made its première at the Royal Court Theatre in London in April
1998. It is more concentrated than Kane's debut play Blasted and also shorter. As Blasted and
Phaedra's Love, which contain five and eight scenes, respectively, Cleansed is not subdivided
into acts. The play comprises a succession of a total of twenty compact scenes of different
length on forty-seven pages. These scenes are discontinuous, the play is not really connected,
and there is no logical development nor chronology. The text is characterised by very short
sentences and spare, compressed speeches, and lines often consist of a single word. The
author herself said about Cleansed: "I didn't want to waste any words."
48
Cohn calls attention
to a possible connection between the reduction of the text and the intensification of themes
and imagery: "The meaning of Cleansed (...) might be extended from its stripped down
dialogue and spare architectonics."
49
The play's pared dialogue, verbal repetitions and long
silences show again Kane's artistic nearness to Beckett whose influence is palpable in each of
her plays.
50
Even though Kane often has her characters speak in one-liners or in utterances
which comprise only one word, the words they utter are nonetheless endowed with meaning
and significance, thanks to the great poetry of the text. Kane herself drew attention to the fact
that in the play sentences carry an allusive burden far beyond their literal meaning. She thus
invited both readers and spectators to read between the lines when stating that "[a]lmost every
line in Cleansed has more than one meaning."
51
Although Kane played and experimented
with language, pushing it to its very limits, she did not rely entirely upon words, as did
Beckett and Pinter.
52
The distrust of language and its power, which is a general characteristic
of her drama, is also obvious in the extremely reduced narrative of her third play. James
Macdonald, who directed Cleansed at the Royal Court, points out that the mere text consti-
tutes only about a third of the play, while the major part of its meaning is conveyed by the
imagery.
53
This prompted theatre critics to suggest that Cleansed "shows" rather than
48
Kane, quoted in Dan Rebellato, "Brief Encounter Platform," public interview with Sarah Kane, Royal
Halloway College, London, 3 November 1998.
49
Cohn, "Sarah Kane, an Architect of Drama," p. 43.
50
See Saunders, "Love me or kill me," p. 55.
51
Kane, quoted in Claire Armitstead, "No pain, no Kane," The Guardian Weekend, 29 April 1998, p. 12.
52
Pinter made no secret of his scepticism about language: "I have mixed feelings about words myself. Moving
among them, sorting them out, watching them appear on the page, from this I derive a considerable pleasure. But
at the same time I have another strong feeling about words which amounts to nothing less than nausea." Harold
Pinter, "Introduction: Writing for the Theatre," in Harold Pinter, Plays: One (London: Eyre Methuen, 1976), p.
13.
53
See Graham Saunders, "Conversation with James Macdonald," in Saunders, "Love me or kill me," p. 122.
24
"tells."
54
In this respect the play differs from Kane's next and last two plays, Crave and 4.48
Psychosis, which give special importance to language and poetry. On the other hand, there are
also parallels between Cleansed and Kane's linguistic plays. Being a poetically dense text in
which not a single word is wasted, the play also anticipates the writing of her two language-
anchored pieces. Cleansed, regarded as "the bleakest and most difficult of Kane's plays"
55
by
David Greig, saw the playwright withdrawing once more from realism.
56
In terms of themes,
technique and stage craft it clearly stands in line with Kane's first two plays and thus contin-
ues, on the one hand, with what the dramatist had already started before. On the other hand,
Cleansed can be considered both an intensification and a reduction in comparison to Blasted
and Phaedra's Love. The condensation of Kane's third play is compensated by its enhanced
cruelty.
57
By literally reducing the text, Kane extended the imagery and thematic nature of the
play. Her habit of increasingly minimising her plays in terms of spoken text, character and
stage scenery has been discussed before. In the introduction of my study I have mentioned
that I consider Cleansed the nucleus of Kane's writing. It is the crucial play in that it takes an
intermediate or central position within her body of work. While it marks the inception of
Kane's concentration on the text which she was to develop further in her next two plays,
Cleansed is more mature than her first two plays, which manifests itself, for instance, in the
number and characterisation of the figures.
58
According to the opening stage directions, the scene of action is a university which is
surrounded by a perimeter fence. Due to the fence and to the cruelties which are taking place
inside the unfathomable institution, however, the setting has often been (mis)interpreted as a
concentration camp or a sadistic or psychiatric hospital.
59
Like a university, the institution is a
microcosm of society, a reflection of reality. The action takes place in several rooms which
bear the names of colours and which are assigned a certain function within the university,
such as the sanatorium, the sports hall and the library. They are all different spaces of this
54
See Aston and Reinelt, "A century in view," p. 1.
55
Greig, Complete Plays, p. xii.
56
See Saunders, "Love me or kill me," p. 87.
57
See Cohn, "Sarah Kane, an Architect of Drama," p. 43.
58
See Cohn, "Sarah Kane, an Architect of Drama," p. 43.
59
See Cohn, "Sarah Kane, an Architect of Drama," p. 43; see also Opel, Sprachkörper, p. 140 and Saunders,
"Love me or kill me," pp. 87, 93; Rebellato puts the connection of a university and the atrocities committed there
down to the "famously fractious relationship she had with the two institutions at which she studied." Rebellato,
"Sarah Kane: an Appreciation," p. 281. The idea that in Cleansed the action takes place in a psychiatric clinic
may in part stem from the fact that the play is dedicated to "the patients and staff of ES3" (Complete Plays,
p.105), the ward of the hospital in London in which Kane stayed several times; see Klaus Peter Müller, "British
Theatre in the 1980s and 1990s: Forms of Hope and Despair, Violence and Love," in Reitz and Stahl, What
Revels are in Hand?, p. 102; see also Margarete Rubik who, as the others referring to the play's dedication,
suggests the possibility of reading the excessive violence in Cleansed as "an indictment of psychiatry."
Margarete Rubik, "Saying the Unspeakable: Realism and Metaphor in the Depiction of Torture in Modern
Drama," in Reitz and Stahl, What Revels are in Hand?, p. 135.
25
kind of institution. With their walls, the rooms forcefully separate the inmates. Typical of
Kane, these rooms are all very circumscribed spaces, and they are very claustrophobic.
As pointed out before, Cleansed is subdivided into scenes and represents continuities
in the form of parallel plot lines which emerge alternately in the process of the twenty short
episodes.
60
The plot strands, which at first appear separately, interweave and converge
increasingly in the course of the play as the dynamics of the characters change. The play
illustrates people in search of love and happiness, but the efforts of the enigmatic institution's
inmates are constantly thwarted by a sadistic figure named Tinker under whose control they
live. He experiments and tests the "students" to see how far they would go for one another
and in order to "find out what power love has over them."
61
There is a test for love in every-
thing. In the figure of Tinker many reviewers recognised a "theatrical joke,"
62
thinking of him
as the dramatic counterfeit of Jack Tinker, a journalist and theatre critic for the Daily Mail,
who had fiercely attacked Kane's debut Blasted, calling it a "disgusting feast of filth."
63
From
the very beginning of the play Tinker is introduced as a torturer who represents power and
authority. He is the one who rules over the microcosm of this institution. Throughout the play
Tinker is associated with death. This becomes evident right from the first scene in which he
helps Graham to kill himself by means of an overdose of heroin shot into his eye. As the play
proceeds, all lovers are punished by Tinker, who is a kind of big brother figure and who
always keeps an eye on everyone. Tinker obliterates the human sides of the other characters in
a very methodical way. The readers or audience never learn the reasons for the vile actions
Tinker perpetrates. The final tableau of the play, two severed characters holding each other by
the hand, could be interpreted as an indication of hope. Yet there are some disturbing ele-
ments which show that this glimmer of hope is not so reassuring after all. Our knowledge that
these severely mutilated characters have suffered the cruellest tortures, casts doubt on a
hopeful and redemptive ending of the play. In Cleansed, hope is an ephemeral and precarious
notion. Even if the rain and Carl's tears are replaced by the sun and Grace's smile, violence
and terror have not stopped. Their power is more devastating than ever before. The last scenic
direction even includes the audience. There is no difference between the characters on stage
and the spectators in the auditorium. The world on stage and the world off-stage melt into one
microcosm. In the end we are left deaf and blind along with Carl and Grace: "The sun gets
brighter and brighter, the squeaking of the rats louder and louder, until the light is blinding
60
See Cohn, "Sarah Kane, an Architect of Drama," p. 43.
61
Greig, Complete Plays, p. xii.
62
Saunders, "Love me or kill me," p. 96.
63
Jack Tinker, quoted in Hattenstone, "A sad hurrah," p. 26.
26
and the sound deafening. Blackout" (20:151). This last stage arrangement starts as something
invigorating, but then suddenly turns into destruction. This is exactly what Cohn's remark
regarding the play's end does not take into consideration: "Except for the rats," she writes,
"Cleansed ends on the only quiescent finale of Kane's three carefully plotted plays of
violence."
64
She misinterprets the function of light, which she reads as a positive element,
maybe transferring from Kane's linguistic plays in which the author "[s]poradically (...)
embraced the biblical metaphor of life as light."
65
She not only ignores the information in the
secondary text "until the light is blinding" (20:151), thus turning what begins as a glimmer of
hope into something that annihilates, but also all the other passages throughout Cleansed in
which light is presented as something that hurts, that mutilates and destroys. The natural
image of light and its meaning will be further discussed in the chapter about imagery and
symbolism.
It is striking that it is, above all, the play's end where opinions are divided. While
some critics read and interpret the final moments of the play as optimistic, assuming that
Tinker undergoes a process of (moral) salvation,
66
others consider this ultimate redemption as
ambiguous,
67
or interpret the end of the play in a completely negative way, claiming that
"[f]inally, the mutilated, rat-bitten, cross-dressed characters conclude that all activity in life is
pointless."
68
Interestingly, there is a close connection between the lack of agreement regard-
ing the ending of the play and the ambiguity concerning its title. We neither know whether the
verb is used in its past participle or adjective form nor what exactly the title indicates or refers
to. The word "cleansed," which can never be heard on stage throughout the play,
69
is ambigu-
ous in the sense that it could either suggest (moral) redemption in the biblical sense, which
some of the characters undergo through the process of love, or it could be understood as an
insinuation to the extermination of some of the inmates.
70
The opaqueness regarding the title
and the open end of Cleansed stand in line with Kane's other plays and can be most perfectly
called an evident feature of her writing. In her plays we do not find an authorial closure,
71
and
this is, according to Sierz, a typical characteristic of drama in the nineties where playwrights
resisted the naturalistic structure of the "well-made-play" with a clear beginning, middle and
64
Cohn, "Sarah Kane, an Architect of Drama," p. 44.
65
Cohn, "Sarah Kane, an Architect of Drama," p. 49.
66
See Saunders, "Love me or kill me," p. 31; cf. Urban, "An Ethics of Catastrophe," p. 37.
67
See Greig, Complete Plays, p. xv.
68
Sanford Sternlicht, A Reader's Guide to Modern British Drama (Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University
Press, 2004), p. 236.
69
See Cohn, "Sarah Kane, an Architect of Drama," p. 44.
70
See Saunders, "Love me or kill me," p. 93.
71
See Urban, "An Ethics of Catastrophe," p. 40.
27
end.
72
Kane had the habit of not explicitly stating everything. Many things are only suggested
or hinted at or remain in complete obscurity. In the end we neither learn what will become of
Carl and Grace, nor whether the unification of Tinker and the Woman is temporary or lasting.
Kane's denial of any responsibility towards the audience is reminiscent of Pinter, who in his
well-known speech, which was later published under the title "Writing for the Theatre," also
stresses the importance of the playwright not providing easy solutions and not revealing too
much concerning the characters:
A play is not an essay, nor should a playwright under any exhortation damage the consistency of
his characters by injecting a remedy or apology for their actions into the last act, simply because
we have been brought up to expect, rain or sunshine, the last act `resolution.' To supply an explicit
moral tag to an evolving and compulsive dramatic image seems to be facile, impertinent and dis-
honest.
73
In her plays, Kane avoids judging or condemning her characters a fact critic Charles
Spencer regretted in his review of Blasted.
74
We have to pass judgement on them ourselves.
By not explicitly stating whether the ending of Cleansed is to be read as morally redemptive,
Kane stops us from rationalising the play. We cannot understand it and the play does not ask
us to understand. There being too many suggestions and no authorial voice guiding us, it
lends itself to different interpretations.
75
I have already drawn attention to the fact that Kane's idea of drama is primarily visual
and that she indulged in connecting elementary topics of everyday life like people loving,
hating and torturing each other, with the representation of very poetic images. The physicali-
sation of these abstract and, to some extent, highly symbolic images, calls for a stage scenery
the installation of which verges on the impossible. Kane's outstanding use of imagery and
surrealistic insertions leads to the question of how realisable her plays are. Some of the scenic
directions make us doubt the possibility of transposing Kane's ideas into real and realistic
stage settings, for instance stage directions which demand snow or rain, squeaking rats or
growing flowers or, as in Blasted, characters crying "huge bloody tears" (5:60).
76
With their
72
See Sierz, In-Yer-Face Theatre, p. 245.
73
Pinter, "Writing for the Theatre," p. 12. The speech was held by Pinter at the National Student Drama Festival
in Bristol in 1962.
74
See Charles Spencer, "Awful shock," The Daily Telegraph, 20 January 1995, p. 19.
75
See Graham Saunders, "Conversation with Daniel Evans," in Saunders, "Love me or kill me," p. 169.
76
An immediate comment is necessary. Her stage directions being inconclusive, it is not easy to tell whether
Kane intended certain scenes to be represented naturalistically, symbolically or surrealistically. The playwright is
reported, however, to have felt uncomfortable about productions that were too realistic and thus lacking the
metaphorical quality of the text; see Rubik, "Saying the Unspeakable," pp. 132-3; see also Hattenstone, "A sad
hurrah," p. 33.
28
poetic imagery and symbolism, Kane's anti-naturalistic plays are a challenge for both direc-
tors and stage designers.
77
However, having worked as both actress and director herself, Kane
had a good sense of what was possible on stage.
78
She was also provided with extraordinary
originality and an imaginative power which helped her to visualise the realisation of her
daring and seemingly impossible scenic directions. Interestingly, she was equating imagina-
tion with physicalisation, making no difference and seeing no barrier between the two. Hence,
she was of the opinion that anything that could be imagined could also be represented on
stage.
79
Cleansed is a very visual play the staging of which constitutes a challenge for every
director in the sense that it requires that none of the poetry of the text be lost in the actual
production.
80
4.2 Themes
Although each of Kane's plays is an outstanding piece of dramatic writing which is singular
in its realisation, they can be connected with each other by means of certain themes and
images which are recurrent in her whole body of work. The analysis of those elements which
carry the meaning of Cleansed its thematic nature, its imagery and symbolism will be the
aim of the following chapters. There are three dominant themes which have a central position
within the play's plot: love, identity and language. Their different uses and purposes shall be
considered and investigated in the following chapters.
4.2.1 Love
In spite of the countless scenes of violence, which are a blatant hallmark of Kane's writing
and maybe the first thing that comes to one's mind when thinking of it, her most frequent and
important theme was love and the investigation of its nature and extremities. Kane's drama
achieves its diversity thanks in part to the manifold representations of her main theme. In all
of her plays love is shown with all of its possible facets, with all of its positive and negative
sides and it is always represented in its most extreme forms. Both love and sexuality are
ambiguous in Kane. As will be seen, they can mean both pleasure and pain.
The exploration of love and of its boundaries is also what lies at heart of Cleansed. In
the play the interactions of the characters circle around and are driven by one central theme:
77
See Greig, Complete Plays, pp. xii-xiii.
78
See James Macdonald, Symposium Schaubühne, Podium 1; see also Sierz, In-Yer-Face Theatre, pp. 91-2 and
Saunders, "Love me or kill me," pp. 12-3. Kane performed, for instance, in a student production of Barker's
Victory (1983) at Bristol University; see Rebellato, "Sarah Kane: an Appreciation," p. 280.
79
See Greig, Complete Plays, p. xiii.
80
See Greig, Complete Plays, p. xiii.
29
love. Love is the characters' power centre. It is their driving force, an invigorating power that
motivates their ways of acting and of thinking. It is what keeps the inmates and their hope
alive.
81
Kane herself considered love in the play as ceaseless, as a last rescue possibility.
82
However, as in her other works, love has many faces and expresses diverse emotions. On the
one hand it is represented as a positive feeling that allows human beings to come together and
to show their good sides. Love-making is illustrated as something that highlights and seals. It
is used as a purifying force and as a counterpart to the atrocities which are perpetrated in the
course of the action. It is one of the characters' various ways to express themselves and their
love. The importance of sex as a means of communication, as a "language" even, is represent-
ed by the character of Carl. Sex is the last means of expression which is left to him after his
tongue (with which he verbally communicates his love), hands (with which he writes a love
message in the mud), and feet (with which he dances a dance of love) have been removed.
When Tinker eventually deprives him of this last medium as well by cutting of his penis, Carl
is left without any possibility to express his feelings.
As in Kane's other plays, Cleansed shows characters who reconcile what seems irrec-
oncilable. While they show a certain degree of world-weariness which manifests itself in their
previously mentioned characteristic of negating love, life, others and themselves, they
simultaneously turn towards life, embodied by their longing for love. The interplay of various
feelings is illustrated in a scene which depicts Grace and Graham as the victims of automatic
gunfire, during which they hold on to each other in an affectionate embrace. After the volley
has ceased, Graham, who has sheltered his sister with his body, utters the words: "No one.
Nothing. Never" (10:133). At first sight this accumulation of negatives gives a repulsive
impression. It seems to be negative and even destructive. However, it springs from Graham's
deepest feelings and has its source in his love for his sister. He, who gives his body as a shield
to protect his sister from the attack, stresses that nothing can come between them and their
love. With his words, which resemble an exorcism of the powers of evil, the intensity of the
dramatic situation ebbs away. The positive meaning of Graham's words is underlined and
intensified by the sudden growing of daffodils.
Kane assumed a close relationship between romanticism and nihilism. Speaking of her
characters, she draws a comparison between these two seemingly contradictory notions:
"Wahrscheinlich sind alle meine Figuren auf die eine oder andere Art hemmungslos roman-
81
See Annabelle Singer, "Don't want to be this: The elusive Sarah Kane," TDR: The Drama Review: A journal
of performance studies, 48:2 (2004), p. 149; see also Sierz, In-Yer-Face Theatre, p. 114.
82
See Tabert, "Gespräch mit Sarah Kane," p. 20.
Details
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